Speaker
Mr
Javier Hernando-Ayuso
(The University of Tokyo)
Description
The development of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has caused big social changes since the beginning of the 21st century. Their computing power and memory has also been growing continuously and can be competitive against traditional machines for not computationally expensive problems. The combination of state of the art Graphical Processing Units and Central Processing Units allows most of these devices to develop remarkable capabilities, both numerical and graphical. While they are being used in several professional fields, they still haven't caused a big impact in the astrodynamics community.
In this paper a multi-platform web application for client's side accurate orbit propagation is presented. This tool can be used not only on a computer, but also in modern mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, either with or without Internet access. It exploits both the processor and graphical capabilities of the hardware to calculate the orbit and other useful information for a mission analyst and to present the results to the user in a friendly and intuitive manner. The astrodynamics tools available at the moment typically require a workstation to be used, which may delay the introduction of the mobile devices in the astrodynamics field. Since an easy-to-access and intuitive use of software should not be against accuracy and results consistency, Dromobile is intended to be a growing tool able to combine both aspects.
The special perturbation method Dromo is used to propagate the orbit, since it has been proved to have a good behavior in terms of computational speed and accuracy (see Urrutxua et. al. "Dromo propagator revisited", Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, 2015. doi: 10.1007/s10569-015-9647-y). The main advantages of Dromo are: the regularization of the equations of motion using a second order generalized Sundman transformation, the use of quaternions to orientate the orbital plane, and the fact that the Dromo elements are constant for Keplerian orbits, among others. The simulation environment is limited at the moment to geocentric orbits and the most important perturbations are included in the simulation.
The tool graphical interface is based on WebGL, which provides a light framework that does not takes away significantly computational power from the relatively heavier orbit calculations. It also allows complete portability between operative systems and devices since its standard is supported by all the major web browsers. Additionally, open source libraries based in the WebGL specification have been used in order to offer a free and flexible framework easy to modify and to add functionalities into.
| Applicant type | First author |
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Primary author
Mr
Javier Hernando-Ayuso
(The University of Tokyo)
Co-author
Mr
Jorge Alonso-Pardo
(Freelance (none))
